The Romantic Revolution

by Tim Blanning

  86. L. D. Ettlinger, “Winckelmann”: The Age of Neo-Classicism, Fourteenth Exhibition of the Council of Europe (London, 1972), pp. xxxiii–iv.

  87. Michael Forsyth, Buildings for Music: The Architect, the Musician, and the Listener from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 104.

  88. Quoted in Adolf Rosenberg, “Friedrich der Große als Kunstsammler,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, new series, 4 (1893), p. 209.

  89. Quoted in James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (New York, 2000), p. 26.

  90. Frances Burney, Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Margaret Anne Doody (London, 1994), p. 116.

  91. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, ed. A. Gillies (Oxford, 1966), p. 92.

  92. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), p. 269.

  93. Ibid., p. 259.

  94. Gerhard von Breuning, Memories of Beethoven: From the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards, ed. Maynard Solomon (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 109–10.

  95. Ibid., p. 111. Cf. Christopher H. Gibbs, “Performances of Grief: Vienna’s Response to the Death of Beethoven,” in Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (eds.), Beethoven and His World (Princeton, 2000), p. 251.

  96. Quoted in Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815–1830 (London, 1991), p. 117.

  97. Richard Wagner, My Life (Cambridge, 1983), p. 30.

  98. Quoted in Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847, rev. ed. (London, 1989), p. 417.

  99. There is a good—and very entertaining—account in ibid., pp. 417–26.

  100. Franz Liszt, “De la situation des artistes et de leur condition dans la société,” Gazette musicale de Paris II, 19, May 10, 1835; 20, May 17, 1835; 30, July 26, 1835; 35, August 30, 1835; 41, October 11, 1835.

  101. Adrian Williams (ed.), Portrait of Liszt by Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford, 1990), p. 351.

  102. In a letter to the members of the musical association on the island of Rügen—H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. V: Haydn: The Late Years (London, 1977), p. 233.

  103. The Musical World XIX, 36, September 5, 1844, p. 291; Williams (ed.), Portrait of Liszt, p. 224.

  104. The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Karen Hill (Ware, 1994), p. 329.

  105. Howard Erskine-Hill, “Pope, Alexander (1688–1744),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online ed., January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22526, accessed September 30, 2008.

  106. Volkmar Braunbehrens, Mozart in Vienna (Oxford, 1991), pp. 316, 331, 349, 363, 368, 419–21.

  107. Quoted in K. M. Baker, “Politique et opinion publique sous l’ancien régime,” Annales: Économie, Société, Civilisation 42, 1 (1987), pp. 56–57.

  108. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1990), p. 17.

  109. Klaus Lankheit, Revolution und Restauration 1785–1855 (Cologne, 1988), p. 9.

  110. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung XXIV, 1 (January 2, 1822), p. 1.

  111. Quoted in Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Kritisch rationale und literarische Öffentlichkeit,” Aufklärung und literarische Öffentlichkeit, eds. Christa Bürger, Peter Bürger, and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), p. 30.

  112. Williams (ed.), Portrait of Liszt, p. 581.

  113. L. A. Willoughby, “Classic and Romantic: A Reexamination,” German Life and Letters 6 (1952), p. 5.

  114. Quoted in H. Kiesel and P. Münch, Gesellschaft und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1977), p. 98.

  115. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1998), p. 28; Elliot Forbes (ed.), Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1969), p. 1046; Stephen Rumph, Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2004), p. 195.

  116. Quoted in William Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism and Musical Idealism,” in David C. Large and William Weber (eds.), Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca and London, 1984), p. 44.

  117. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Review of Johann Georg Sulzer,” Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste in einzelnen, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter, auf einander folgenden Artikeln (Leipzig, 1771), first published in the Frankfurter gelehrten Anzeigen (1772), here in Goethes Werke, hrsg. im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, vol. 37 (Weimar, 1896), p. 213.

  118. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London, 1958), pp. 33, 35.

  119. Quoted in Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre (Munich, 2007), pp. 106–07.

  120. Dieter Arendt, “Brentanos Philister-Rede am Ende des romantischen Jahrhunderts oder Der Philister-Krieg und seine unrühmliche Kapitulation,” Orbis Litterarum 55, 2 (2000).

  121. Quoted in F. W. J. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France 1789–1848 (Leicester, 1987), p. 260.

  122. T. J. Reed, Schiller (Oxford, 1991), pp. 68–69.

  123. James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989), p. 329.

  124. Book 5, chap. 2. Eric Blackall (ed.), Goethe: The Collected Works, vol. 9: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Princeton, 1995), p. 172.

  125. Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford, 1997) p. 20.

  126. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens 1823–1832, ed. Ernst Merian-Genast, 2 vols. (Basle, 1945), vol. I, p. 309.

  127. Goethe, Faust, Part Two, trans. David Luke (Oxford, 1994), p. 223.

  128. Mack Walker, German Home Towns (Ithaca, 1971), pp. 29–33.

  129. Albert Cassagne, La théorie de l’art pour l’art en France chez les derniers romantiques et les premiers réalistes (Paris, 1906), p. 23.

  130. Benjamin Constant, Journal intime, précédé du Cahier rouge et d’Adolphe, ed. Jean Mistler (Monaco, 1945), p. 159. “J’ai une conversation avec Robinson, élève de Schelling. Son travail sur l’Ésthetique de Kant a des idées très énergiques. L’art pour l’art, sans but, car tout but dénature l’art.” In Modern Language Notes for March 1910, J. E. Spingarn correctly identified Constant’s use of the phrase in his Journal intime but simply stated, “Constant sums up Schelling’s aesthetics,” without mentioning Robinson’s intermediary role.

  131. Ibid., pp. 38–39; Alfred Michiels, Histoire des idées littéraires en France au XIXe siècle, vol. II (Paris, 1863), p. 113.

  132. Cassagne, La théorie de l’art pour l’art, p. 53.

  133. Stendhal, Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (London, 1956), pp. 235, 371, 407–08.

  134. Joseph d’Ortigue, “Des sociétés philharmoniques dans le Midi de la France,” Gazette musicale de Paris I, 48, November 30, 1824, p. 383.

  135. Revue et gazette musicale de Paris II, 46, November 15, 1835.

  136. Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, p. 250.

  137. A. Specht, “Vocabulaire artistique: Le bourgeois,” Revue et gazette musicale de Paris X, 53, December 31, 1843, pp. 440–42.

  138. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (London and New Haven, 1950), pp. 50–51.

  139. Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace: The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, vol. IV, 2nd ed. (London and New Haven, 1953), p. 187.

  140. Theodore Besterman, Voltaire, (London, 1969), pp. 367–72.

  141. Voltaire, Candide, trans. Norman Cameron (London, 1947), pp. 13–14.

  142. Indeed, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire to criticize his treatment of the Lisbon earthquake—Nicholas Shrady, The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (New York, 2008), pp. 122–23.

  143. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), p. 531. Although he writes with his customary fluency and intelligence about Rousseau, Gay overestimates Rousseau’s enlightened charac
teristics.

  144. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 2006), p. 163. As this highly entertaining account reveals, both men behaved badly, but it was Rousseau’s paranoia that was to blame for the rupture.

  145. Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 190.

  146. Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats 1814–21, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1958), vol. I, p. 184.

  147. G. L. Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature (London, n.d.), pp. 184–86, 189.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

  1. “Ode to a Nightingale,” Miriam Allott (ed.), The Poems of John Keats (London, 1970), p. 529.

  2. James E. May, “Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30260, accessed October 16, 2008.

  3. Quoted in W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford, 1965), pp. 37–38.

  4. John Louis Kind, Edward Young in Germany (New York, 1906), p. 41.

  5. Ibid., p. 29.

  6. H. S. Reiss (ed.), The Political Thought of the German Romantics (Oxford, 1955), p. 134.

  7. Quoted in Maurice Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 1961), p. 4.

  8. Etymologically there is no link between the “mare” of “nightmare” and a female horse, but the two were often compounded.

  9. Ernst Beutler, “Johann Heinrich Füssli,” Goethe: Viermonatsschrift der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 4 (1939), p. 19.

  10. Ibid.; H. W. Janson, Sixteen Studies (New York, 1973), p. 79. This chapter, titled “Fuseli’s Nightmare,” appeared originally in Arts and Sciences II, 1 (1963).

  11. Ibid., p. 82. The first of these quotations can also be found in Nicolas Powell, Fuseli, “The Nightmare” (London, 1973), p. 60. Powell is at pains to stress the traditional elements in Fuseli’s work, stating firmly: “To regard this picture [The Nightmare] as a precocious example of nineteenth-century romanticism, let alone of Surrealism, is to misunderstand it,” but he both underestimates the originality of Fuseli’s vision and imposes too demanding a definition of romanticism. More cogent is Michael Levey’s conclusion: “The individual’s sensations are what matter; and in opting out of the social framework, Fuseli is already romantic”—Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting (London, 1966), p. 202.

  12. Janson, Sixteen Studies, p. 79.

  13. Karl S. Guthke, “Introduction,” Henry Fuseli, Remarks on the Writing and Conduct of J.-J. Rousseau, reprinted in facsimile (Los Angeles, 1960), p. ii; Eudo C. Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli: Selections from His Writings with an Introductory Study (London, 1951), pp. 13, 43–44.

  14. Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli, p. 67.

  15. Ibid., p. 69.

  16. It is reproduced in Martin Myrone, Henry Fuseli (London, 2001), p. 14.

  17. Henry Fuseli 1741–1825 (London, 1975), p. 39; Levey, Rococo to Revolution, p. 201.

  18. Christoph Becker, “Friar Puck und Fairy-shot: Geister in Füsslis Kunst,” in Franziska Lentzsch (ed.), Füssli: The Wild Swiss (Zürich, 2005), pp. 115–42. This exhibition catalog contains a host of excellent reproductions of Fuseli’s work.

  19. Heinrich Fuessli, Aphorismen über die Kunst (Basle, 1944), p. 132.

  20. “Second Ode on Art [between 1772 and 1775]”:

  Among the mob that every rotten wind

  Blows into your palaces, O Rome,

  The mob of Germans, Britons, French,

  The mob of Polish and of Muscovites

  The vermin of art—thus I spent a day

  Wandering with trembling foot among your temples

  And cursed in furor incessate

  The academies of London and of France.

  A. M. Atkins, “ ‘Both Turk and Jew’: Notes on the Poetry of Henry Fuseli, with Some Translations,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16, 4 (1983), p. 209. Fuseli’s aversion to academic art did not prevent him enjoying a mutually beneficial relationship with the Royal Academy in London.

  21. Perhaps not surprisingly, this has been reproduced many times. A high-quality reproduction, together with another similar scene, can be found in Rolf Toman (ed.), Klassizismus und Romantik. Architektur—Skulptur—Malerei—Zeichnung: 1750–1848 (Cologne, 2000), p. 341.

  22. Quoted in David Blayney Brown, Romanticism (London, 2001), p. 316.

  23. Quoted in Myrone, Henry Fuseli, pp. 46–47.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, ed. J. M. Cohen (London, 1953), pp. 27–28.

  26. Ibid., p. 408.

  27. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, ed. Peter Virchow (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 44.

  28. Quoted in Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford, 1994), p. 35.

  29. Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre (Munich, 2007), p. 13.

  30. Eckart Klessmann, Die deutsche Romantik (Cologne, 1981), p. 167.

  31. Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich (London, 2000), pp. 86, 89–91, 152–53, 158–59, 164–65, 168–69, 173–75, 179, 194, 196–97, 233, 246–49.

  32. Jens Christian Jensen, Caspar David Friedrich: Leben und Werk, 10th ed. (Cologne, 1995), p. 228.

  33. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York, 1996), p. 342. A recent poll of eight hundred playwrights, actors, directors, and journalists conducted by the National Theatre voted Waiting for Godot “the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century,” notwithstanding the fact that the first version was written in French; http://www.samuel-beckett.net/BerlinTraffic.html.

  34. Nicholas Temperley, “John Field and the First Nocturne,” Music and Letters, 56 (1975), p. 337.

  35. Robin Langley, “Field, John,” Grove Music Online: Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/09603, accessed December 2, 2008; Michael Cole, The Pianoforte in the Classical Era (Oxford, 1998), p. 107.

  36. Franz Liszt, “John Field und seine Nocturnes (1859),” in Franz Liszt, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. L. Ramann, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1880–83), vol. IV, p. 268. Although Liszt writes with feeling and insight about Field and his music, his biographical section begins: “Born in England, at Dublin in 1782 …”

  37. Steven Lebetter, untitled introduction to the recording of Field’s nocturnes by John O’Connor—Telarc CD-80199.

  38. Otto Erich Deutsch (ed.), Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends (London, 1958), p. 138.

  39. Quoted in Paul Lawley, “ ‘The Grim Journey’: Beckett Listens to Schubert,” in Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (eds.), Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 = Samuel Beckett: Fin sans fin en l’an 2000 (Amsterdam, 2001), p. 260.

  40. The best-quality reproductions of the three versions are to be found in Werner Hofmann, Das entzweite Jahrhundert: Kunst zwischen 1750 und 1830 (Munich, 1995), pp. 541–43.

  41. Quoted in Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Eleanor A. Sayre (eds.), Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment (Boston, 1989), p. 115.

  42. Ibid., p. 111.

  43. Ibid., p. 115.

  44. Robert Hughes, Goya (London, 2003), pp. 165–67.

  45. Priscilla E. Muller, “Goya, Francisco de,” in Grove Art Online: Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/To33882, accessed December 9, 2008.

  46. Hughes, Goya, pp. 127–28.

  47. Ibid., pp. 130–31; Hofmann, Das entzweite Jahrhundert, p. 516.

  48. Hughes, Goya, p. 140.

  49. Nigel Glendinning, Goya and His Critics (New Haven and London, 1977), pp. 45–46. Glendinning quotes this and subsequent documents in full.

  50. Ibid., p. 49.

  51. Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 3 vols. (Munich, 1963), p. 861.

  52. See above, p. 51.

  53. There is a small reproduction in Hughes, Goya, p. 192. For a much larger version, see Camilo José Cela, Los Caprichos
de Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Madrid, 1989), p. 51.

  54. Blayney Brown, Romanticism, p. 316.

  55. Quoted in André Malraux, Saturn: An Essay on Goya (London, 1957), p. 25.

  56. Quoted in José López-Rey, Goya’s Caprichos, vol. I (Princeton, 1953), p. 102.

  57. Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford, 1987), pp. 130–31.

  58. Ibid., p. 131.

  59. Allott (ed.), The Poems of John Keats, p. 539. For an illuminating analysis of this and other poems by Keats, see Robin Mayhead, John Keats (Cambridge, 1967).

  60. Allott (ed.), The Poems of John Keats, p. 525.

  61. Ibid., p. 527.

  62. Alethea Hayter, “Introduction,” in Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Alethea Hayter (Oxford, 1971), p. 14.

  63. Ibid., pp. 20, 48.

  64. David Cairns, Berlioz, vol. I: The Making of an Artist, 1803–1832 (London, 1989), pp. 329–30.

  65. David Cairns (ed.), The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (London, 1969), p. 576.

  66. Cairns, Berlioz, vol. I, p. 339.

  67. Ibid., p. 332. Cf. Nicholas Temperley, “The ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ and Its Programme,” The Musical Quarterly 57, 4 (1971), pp. 593–608.

  68. Cairns, Berlioz, vol. I, pp. 327–28.

  69. Ibid., pp. 328–29.

  70. Hugh Macdonald, “Berlioz, Hector,” in Grove Music Online: Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/

  music/51424pg14, accessed December 12, 2008.

  71. “Concert dramatique de M. Berlioz,” Revue musicale VI, 46 (December 15, 1832), pp. 365–66.

  72. Édouard Fétis, “Concert donné par M. Berlioz,” Revue musicale VIII, 48 (November 30, 1834), p. 381. Almost exactly the same criticism was made 170 years later by Rodney Milnes in an article in BBC Music Magazine, in which Berlioz’s music was dismissed as unbearably long-winded, utterly humorless, devoid of any sense of stage time, and incapable of sustaining a melodic argument—http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200401/ai_n9359319, accessed December 12, 2006.